The Followed Man by Thomas Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

and inadequate.
    "I mean, don't you ever
think about it?" Robin asked, with what seemed to be sincere
curiosity.
    "Look," Luke said,
"I'm thinking about her situation. She's got at least two little
kids that splash too much in the bathtub, and probably token
insurance from his union and maybe no other kind, unless he was in
the service and that wouldn't amount to much. It's a matter of
survival I'm thinking about, and sorrow and grief and no resources.
Maybe I'm wrong, but how can I . . ."
    "Maybe because of your
family and all that?" Robin said hesi­tantly. "I can
understand . . ."
    "Maybe that's part of it.
Or maybe it's that I think this whole city is a cancerous growth of
some kind."
    "Hey, man! Wow! I mean,
that's pretty heavy, huh? This city? It's where we all are. It's
what's going on."
    Yes, it was what was going on
everywhere, and that was not to be thought about, but he couldn't not
think. That sense should be dulled. Now he wanted Robin gone. He
could not dislike the shin­ing little man, though Robin's
energies seemed to him half-mad.
    Robin did leave soon, both of
them having agreed to meet to­morrow noon at the building site.
Then he was alone again in this old, expensive room, a place where,
perhaps because of the im­perative of the two rigidly geometrical
beds, he could not think of sitting down to work. Not at that
desk-bureau with its thick glass top, not in that stuffed chair. The
shape of the room, its amber, used shadows, the height and breadth of
the windows, the high moist cell of its bathroom, its closet of
hangers like disembodied shoulders—all was wrong for sitting
down with his pencil and notes and that last twisting of the mind
that might turn chaos into thought.
    He had a quick desire for
whiskey that jerked his shoulders to­ward the bottle as though
cords had snapped—a weakness, almost like falling, before he
caught his balance again. He said out loud, "If I could think of
what to do, where to be, I would not need that drug." The voice
remained alive in the room, directed by some other self toward his
listening self, which now lost all pride or in­dependence at all.
As he poured some whiskey in a glass the other voice said shame,
death: there are places in this world which, with­out your
self-pitying despair, are beautiful beyond imagination, the very
models of our conception of heaven.
    And then he did see a world,
strangely a place of deep winter, with himself in it. In moonlight, a
small field half-grown-up in gray birch and poplar, surrounded by
dark woods. The moon was cold, distant, almost at the full, its
miracle a pale silence in which the cold, glittering across the snow,
seemed to have frozen the air itself. It was a world of crystal,
deathly blue-silver, brittle, motion­less. A step would cause the
snow to scream, if a step could be taken in this interstellar cold.
But at one edge of the field a small window gave a dim yellow light.
There was a cabin there, nearly submerged in the deep snow; that one
small yellow eye, and a white ray of smoke that rose straight as a
column, proved that something here was alive.
    Now he became embodied in this
wilderness. He was on cross­country skis, the light wooden wands
bearing him easily, as if he were nearly weightless. He was cold,
feet and fingers and face, but not chilled. He wore a light pack on
his back, and his arms as they held his long bamboo poles were weary
yet strong. He glided easi­ly toward the small windowlight, the
snow squeaking cleanly along his narrow skis. What would he find in
that buried cabin? What would it be like? As he approached he seemed
to know the cabin with a maker's knowledge, and at the same time it
was new to him.
    The snow had pillowed up over
the cabin from the west, drifted in a whorl over the low gable, and
he saw as he approached its roofed porch and log columns that it was
the classic, neolithic log cabin which lent, it was said, its spatial
harmonies to the Parthenon. Sidestepping, he skied down